NVN Monday: So Far So Far

"On the Aftermath of a Consequential Election" by Peter Nohrnberg, "Just Another Day in Trumpmerica... Is It Just Me?" by Robin Stevens Payes, "How Do You Read the Law?" by Jeff Hardin

ON THE AFTERMATH OF A CONSEQUENTIAL ELECTION

by Peter Nohrnberg

Art by Soybeing at Michael Moore Substack

*

Outraged and exhausted, we make our choice
guided by billions that masquerade as voice.
Like good consumers, we were well apprised; 
knew the cost of eggs, if not of lies.
Fever dreams of unruly immigration 
return to T---p the frayed reigns of the nation.
Sworn in under the Capitol’s Rotunda—
a cold snap turns DC to arctic tundra—
the colossus takes his oath on Lincoln’s Bible.
(Who but Abe or Jesus can claim libel?) 
Fearing his dark promise of retribution 
Silicon Valley makes a contribution. 
Bureaucrats begin to take their leave 
as Musk and DOGE descend like drones on Kyiv.
Among those given the algorithmic axe:
employees who fend off nuclear attacks. 
Less government reform than “shock and awe,” 
cutting of red tape, and rule of law. 
T---p wields his blunt Sharpie like a machete,
shreds the Constitution to confetti.
Vital public info goes up in smoke,
sacrificed on the altar of “anti-woke.”
An able four-star general gets the sack,
replaced by one with three-stars who’s not black.  
POTUS’s pen claims there’s but two genders;
and those born intersex? return to sender!
Like King David who forgave his half-brother, 
Trump pardons both rioter and traitor. 
The Senate coddles his menagerie of weasels 
while unvaxed kids in Texas contract measles.  
The keys to New York City pass to ICE
while Don Junior cavorts on Greenland’s ice.
Deported “illegals” are dealt a dismal fate:
and on the return flight? The brothers Tate. 
Statecraft becomes T---p’s Art of the Self-Deal,
while folks in Gaza scavenge for a meal. 
(One day they’ll all be served a ten-course feast 
at the “Riviera of the Middle East”;
but first they must go on a long vacation 
while Gaza undergoes renovation). 
Back in the Oval Office on his knees 
Zelenskyy begs, but stops at “pretty please”:
desperately in need of guns and tanks,  
dressed down for not dressing up, not saying “thanks.” 
 
Does the arc of history bend toward justice;
Or does history simply bend and break us? 
Does democracy die in darkness, or blinding light? 
How should we view this spectacle, our plight? 
Will art and culture help us ride out the storm,
or did they bring about this new abnorm?  
Did treating blue collar folks as ignore-ables 
help gather MAGA’s “basket of deplorables”?
Or were their grievances, self-pity
what drove them to become so proudly sh---y? 
Perhaps there’s something deep within us all 
that answers to the con man’s siren call.   
Devotion to another’s certainty 
distracts us from the world’s contingency.  
How easy to blame DEI, the border;
easier still to make disorder out of order.
 
When power controls the future and the past, 
can even the written word persist, outlast?  
Yet words, like insects tend to stick around;
gone for years, they emerge from underground:
can sting or float, be bee or butterfly,
little strong things to pinch an ugly lie.

*

A poet, cultural critic, and a scholar of literary modernism, Peter Nohrnberg has had his poetry published by Southwest Review, Notre Dame Review, The Wisconsin Review, and Oxford Poetry, among other journals. His poem “Pantoum After a School Shooting” was awarded second place in the 2020 Morton Marr Poetry Prize.

*

JUST ANOTHER DAY IN TRUMPMERICA… IS IT JUST ME?

by Robin Stevens Payes

Art by Adam Bissonnette at Michael Moore Substack

*

Tired, headachy, lethargic. Is it just me? Perhaps it’s the weather—80 degrees and sunny one day; 50 and foggy the next. The air is close, closing in. Maybe it’s not the weather. The world is closing in. Tariffs, abductions, mass firings. Check your feed. War, threats of war, trading wars. I’m stunned it’s only taken 73 days to destroy US, America the Beautiful. 250 years to build a never-perfect, ever-striving union. Less than a quarter of one to tear it down. Is it just me? Everything looks the same; people keep saying so. I must see for myself. I’m sitting in Panera over a chai tea latte. Frivolous purchase, I know. We are a beautiful hodgepodge of America here: women, men white, black, immigrant, young, old. People smiling and holding open doors for each other. Pleases and thank yous. Chess game in the corner. Regular kaffeeklatsch arguing over who knows what. Friends schmoozing. Babies cooing. Liberation Day. Is it just me? Liberating US from prosperity. Trade wars with friends. Who needs friends? Or lumber, paper, car parts. Semiconductors stranded. Champagne uncorked. Hurray, it’s Liberation Day, who’s rallying? Is it just me? Domestic pain. Prices rise. Kentucky bourbon for US alone. Chickens no longer laying. Check your feed! Factory cows bellowing in pain for wont of milking. Grain rotting across the fruited plain. What’s a rally in reverse? Markets tumbling. Panicked 401k holders. Is it just me? Temporary, they say. The trumpists trumpet prosperity. Our full faith and credit: In Who We Trust? We have met the gangster and it is US. Oops, roped up the wrong bad guy. Tattoos—you know; they all look alike. All deportations final: no returns. Sorry, not sorry. This is the plan, they keep saying. Breaking news. Breaking US. Check our feed. A blizzard of factless, faceless counterfactuals blowing, billowing, burying US in unreason. Ah, but yes, there are faces. Starring Trump, Musk. Musk, Trump. Bit parts for SecDef, HHS, ICE. IRS, Treasury, because, billionaires. State, misstated. Walk-offs for WWE, monkeys in the GOP. Have you memorized your lines? Get your cues down! NEVER disagree. Enemies gain. Deus ex machina Putin putting in appearances. Begin bombing. Erdogan saving Syria for Russia. China selling TikTok; keeping the algorithms. Keeping US in its cheap Big Data net. Digitize US. Creators creating AI fear it’s surpassed us. Why would Nero fiddle when AI’s mastered music from every composer ever? Better, cheaper, quicker. They’ve lost control. Just another day in Trumpmerica. We are a beautiful hodgepodge of America here: women, men white, black, immigrant, young, old. US. We the People must not loose our reign. Tired, headachy, lethargic. Rally on! I won’t lose control. Is it just me?

*

Robin Stevens Payes is a time traveler who reasons that time and space are just inconvenient rules that other people decided the world must follow. After decades of trying to fit some notion of “normal” she chose to dive deeper into the offbeat, allowing verse to fill a poetic void. She is author of the YA-time travel adventure book series, Edge of Yesterday. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She is time traveling to retrieve fragments of her grandmother Sophie’s story in [re]member the world, weaving together poetry, memoir, history and science. She writes about the process of weaving memory into a tapestry on her Substack

*

HOW DO YOU READ THE LAW?

by Jeff Hardin

The Tennessee Senate on Thursday approved legislation that could subject churches and charitable organizations to lawsuits if they provide housing aid to immigrants without legal status who go on to commit a crime… Sen. Jeff Yarbro, a Nashville Democrat, noted the bill makes changes to a portion of Tennessee’s “Good Samaritan” statutes, which are designed to shield individuals and organizations that provide aid from lawsuits. “What we are doing here is we are literally limiting the application of the Good Samaritan law,” Yarbro said. —Tennessee Lookout, April 3, 2025

*

We finally got around to laws against
loving one’s neighbor. After all, feed
someone hungry, then ever afterwards
one should be accountable for any crime
he commits. Had he died instead, he
wouldn’t have crossed that yellow line!
 
There was snow on the roads, a dark night.
In another month, buttercups in the ditch.
None of us survives experiments going on
around us—a high limb nudged by wind,
a few words spoken in haste, others unvoiced.
 
A friend describes an island—secluded
but uninhabitable. Think of standing—
wind-lashed, unsteady, uncertain—on
ground knife-edged in every direction.
 
New weights are added the longer one
hesitates deciding which step to take.

*

Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in Image, The Laurel Review, The Inflectionist Review, and others. His eighth collection, Coming into an Inheritance, is forthcoming. He lives in Tennessee.